Anti-Shows
by Alexandra Danilova, Maja Fowkes, Reuben Fowkes, Richard Goldstein, Sven Gundlakh, Ilya Kabakov, Elena Kuprina-Lyakhovich, Valerie Smith, Victor Tupitsyn, and Margarita Tupitsyn
The State Tretyakov Gallery, the leading reservoir of Russian fine art in the world, has presented iconic masterpieces for the first time ever in Doha as part of Qatar-Russia 2018 Year of Culture. The exhibition catalogue traces the connections between the artworks by revolutionary pioneers of the early 20th century such as Vladimir Tatlin, Alexander Rodchenko and Mikhail Matyushin in comparison to the creations of the artists of the avant-garde second wave. The most radical discoveries of the...
Faberge and the Russian Master Goldsmiths
by Gerard Hill and G.G. Smorodinova
Peter Carl Faberge (1846-1920) is deservedly the most famous creator of the stunning gold, silver, and jewel-studded treasures of imperial Russia. Perhaps because of the popularity of his Easter eggs, Faberge's skilled competitors have been largely overlooked. Faberge and the Russian Master Goldsmiths tells their story and features their masterpieces as well as Faberge's. Today, the creations of the Russian master goldsmiths are dispersed throughout the world. A broad sampling of masterpieces fr...
The Avant-Garde in Georgia
by Nana Kipiani, Irine Jorjadze, and Tea Tabatadze
In the turbulent global context following the fall of the Russian Empire and the October Revolution, Georgia declared its independence in 1918. Between then and the beginning of Soviet rule in 1921, an Avant-Garde creative scene burgeoned. Artists met, mainly in the many taverns and cafés in Kutaisi and the capital Tbilisi, to organise multidisciplinary events. Their frequent collaborations and interactions, which bore the imprint of Georgian tradition and Western and Eastern influences, took va...
Wassily Kandinsky was undoubtedly one of the most exciting artists of the twentieth century. He brought an equal passion and commitment to his work as a painter, a theoretician and a teacher of art. After conventional beginnings in Munich, he devoted his intellectual and artistic energies to pioneering new dimensions of expression in art. He ultimately arrived at an abstract style of painting based on the inner properties of colour and form. Although Kandinsky may not be the first truly abstract...
Cinemasaurus (Film and Media Studies)
Cinemasaurus examines contemporary Russian cinema as a new visual economy, emerging over three decades after the Soviet collapse. Focusing on debates and films exhibited at Russian and US public festivals where the films have premiered, the volume's contributors—the new generation of US scholars studying Russian cinema—examine four issues of Russia's transition: (1) its imperial legacy, (2) the emergence of a film market and its new genres, (3) Russia's uneven integration into European values a...
Past Imperfect (Judaic Traditions in LIterature, Music, and Art)
by Alice Nakimovsky
As a soviet underground artist, Grisha Bruskin was propelled to prominence after the unprecedented success of his paintings at the Sotheby Moscow auction of 1988. Since then his work has been exhibited all over the world at the Guggenheim, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Jewish Museum in New York. Past Imperfect deftly captures the artist's experiences as a Jew in Russia, the reality of life in an empire permeated by ideology, and the centrality of family. Satu...
From the time the word kul'tura entered the Russian language in the early nineteenth century, Russian arts and letters have thrived on controversy. At any given time several versions of culture have coexisted in the Russian public sphere. The question of what makes something or someone distinctly Russian was at the core of cultural debates in nineteenth-century Russia and continues to preoccupy Russian society to the present day. When Art Makes News examines the development of a public discourse...
Russia has undergone an amazing cultural and political transformation over the past forty years. How has its rapidly changing social landscape shaped its art? And how does art effect social and cultural change within Russia? This generously illustrated volume explores these questions by presenting a broad but balanced selection of work by eighty Russian artists working from the 1970s to the present day. It features many newcomers, including Alexei Kallima, Kerim Ragimov and Olga Chernysheva alon...
The Great Russian Utopia (Art & Design Profile S., #29)
This issue of "Art & Design" gives a colourful overview of the work produced during one of the most artistically creative and prolific eras of the 20th century. Russian avant-garde art and design was an expression of a profound change in the sensibility of mankind, a search for a utopia. Guest-editor Victor Arwas, an expert on art and the decorative arts of the early part of this century, provides several informative sections covering avant-garde painting, reliefs, ceramics, books and graphics,...
Art of the Mammoth Hunter (Oxbow Monographs in Archaeology, #49)
by Mariana Gvozdover
Unique examples of Paleolithic art and a rich collection of stone and bone implements make the site of Avdeevo one of the most interesting and important of the Upper Paleolithic on the Russian plain. These assemblages point to clear connections with sites such as Willendorf and Dolni Vestonice in central Europe as well as with the similar Russian site at Kostenki. The worked bone and art objects include bone awls and decorated points, burnishers, diadems, trinkets and beads. There are fragments...
After the 1917 revolution, Russian and Soviet avant-garde theatre attempted to create a new art for post-revolutionary society. This reconsideration of the Russian avant-garde theatre investigates the burgeoning new drama/theatre forms of the period. Kleberg considers assumptions made about the audience and by the audience, and seeks to determine whether discrepancies existed between the two. Offering fresh insights into the modernist period of Russian theatre, Theatre as Action provides a new t...
The Russian Avant-Garde, which brought about an artistic revolution between 1905 and 1934, represents one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of 20th-century art. Artists like Malevich, Kandinsky and Chagall are highly esteemed the world over. But this movement was much more diverse than is generally realised. For the first time this artistic wealth is being presented in a major sequence of pictures. 140 masterpieces of painting demonstrate the parallel development of widely differen...
The development of Soviet realist painting over fifty years through a selection of works from Russia’s leading museums. Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content a...